£5,000 for a projector in any economic climate is a lot. In this one it's obscene.

Verdict

Projectors don't get much better than the Sony Bravia VPL-VW80, with vivid colours and scarily dark blacks. It comes at a price, though.

With its intense blackness and enigmatic contours, the Sony Bravia VPL-VW80 looks more like something the military might use to hurt people than a full-HD projector. And given the amount of hi-tech gubbinry packed in we wouldn’t be surprised if it was invented by them.

The Sony Bravia VPL-VW80 produces some of the best images you’ll ever see from a projector and has a specification sheet that makes for impressive reading. Contrast ratio? Sky high (30,000:1). Black levels? terrifying! HDMI ports? Two of ‘em. And with six million pixels making up the pristine 1080p signal, you’re gifted a dramatic image with inky blacks and sharp edges. Sony’s Real Colour Processing meanwhile is making sure that colours are as bright as can be. When the claret starts to flow on screen, we guarantee you’ll see vivid red. And should you enjoy lady films, well, we dare say the handbags will look terrif’ n’ all.

That the images (even at a whopping 25 feet across) are so smooth is also down to Sony’s own Motionflow Dark Frame tech and the 100Hz motion control which makes it smooth like a killer whale’s shiny back.

All this technical goodness, however, comes at a price, and the Sony Bravia VPL-VW80′s is around £5,000! Given the state of the economy, it would be hard to justify spending £5k on a projector – even when it’s this good. And it’s for that reason, and pretty much no other, that we’re knocking a star off.